When Ms Jocelyn Bell found the first signal coming from what was later called a pulsar the first explanation coming to mind was that it was sent from "Little green men". Now Einstein@home is finding on average a radio pulsar every .week in data coming from Parkes and Arecibo, but also possibly from a gamma-ray satellite.So if SETI@home identifies a signal coming from some area in the sky in a constant, not random, manner it might also be caused by natural phenomena.
Only if it can be shown to contain some form of message one could jump to the conclusion that it had an intelligent origin.
Tullio

Could such a signal if ever being detected have any numbers attributed to it or included in it?

Could it be a voice or maybe some kind of a musical tone?

If you write a sentence, like this one, it is consisting of written words.

If you try speaking the same language into a microphone and thereafter recording or storing it for subsequent playback following next, you may possibly end up viewing or interpreting the same file as a wave file, or more commonly in use here, a gaussian.

Yet again, my thoughts are going back to the movie "Encyclopaedia Galactica".

The big black "monsters" in this science fiction movie were in fact cyborgs.

They were able to express themselves (in English) using a "metallic" voice.

Still, you may be able to attribute a certain melodic tone when it comes to the use of their voices.

Same goes for musical singers. For male singers, you may have bass voices.

Although I am not an expert on the different terms being used for singing here, at least some have barython, sopran or something else which is similar to or resembles this when it comes to singing voices instead.

Of course, the contents (or meaning) of their songs are still the same, the words in the song supposedly or assumedly is determining its general meaning.

Remember whales are supposed to be singing as well. What is the meaning of their melodies? They are not supposed to be having any "language".

We are using the Latin alphabet, but there other alphabets. Also, there are ideographic writing systems like Chinese, Korean and Japanese which are not alphabets.So, what would an alien use?
Tullio

We cannot even begin to fathom that... Hope for binary I guess. ;-)

This is what I mean though about receiving an intelligent signal. I doubt we would ever in our lifetimes be able to decode any information from it.

And Musicplayer. Whale songs ARE language. Just one that we haven't quite cracked. We can identify certain pods based on their music, but we don't know what it "means". I think it would be the same situation with ET signals. We may be smart enough to assign certain signals to "different" ET, but we may have a real hard time ever figuring out the meaning.#resist

We sent a probe out into space many years ago telling the universe where we are plus some basic details about us. So staying in hiding would not make
much sense here, would it.

Actually we sent two probes. But we could probably send a thousand every day for thousands of years and not have one of them cross paths with any intelligence even assuming there are thousands of aliens out there looking for traces of another civilization. That is unless they are already on our doorstep.Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

If a signal is received and then deleted by mysterious men in black then we never know of a signal

ergo because we can never prove there was such a signal, there is nothing science nor the scientific community can ever do to argue there ever was one.

If we know who the mysterious men are, then they are not so mysterious and we would have the signal.

For proof that signals do get reported then look at the wow signal, if these theories of signal interruption where true then I would imagine the wow signal should of disappeared not long after the wow signal came through.

The problem is that the question pre-supposes the existence of a "Men In Black" type team, for which there's no evidence to believe exists. The statement "...given the track record of the US Military with regards to the ET subject..." is a misleading one.

The official track record is that they are not aware of any alien existence. Like all top-secret projects, the preparation for ET is always an on-going thing, so they will not comment on whatever intelligence they've gathered, but that doesn't imply that they have proof-positive of an alien existence here on Earth or elsewhere.

Then there's the statement "I don't believe for 1 second that the US goverment wouldn't try to keep this sort of thing quiet", but there are more governments out there than the US government, and not all of them would co-operate with the US government on any alleged alien interactions. Indeed, other governments may not share the same alleged paranoia some believe our government has when it comes to public knowledge of aliens. The planet is too large and there's too many people to ever attempt to hide alien visitations to our planet.

In all, the entire question itself is self-defeating logic and, no offense, pointless. While our government might be collecting any sort of data they can, there's no reason to believe they would hide it from the public. It would be a proud moment for mankind, and I don't see any reason why they would keep it hidden (or even try to).